The Re-Production of Gender in Early Childhood Education: A Feminist New Materialist Analysis

Mallet, Rochelle (2025). The Re-Production of Gender in Early Childhood Education: A Feminist New Materialist Analysis. Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) thesis The Open University.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21954/ou.ro.00102516

Abstract

This thesis is an ethnographic study of three Early Childhood Education settings in the East of England. It examines the ways that gender is produced and reproduced in these nursery settings. Participants included the infants and young children who attended the settings, the adults who worked there, and the environment itself. Drawing on feminist new materialism as a theoretical framework, a shift in focus towards the material world has informed how the research was designed, conducted, and analysed. This drew focus to the messiness and unpredictability of how gender manifests across and between the social and material world. Using diffractive analysis to de-centre the human, this thesis focuses on time and space, power, and the material world to examine how intra–acting networks of social and material entities reproduce gender. As a researcher I am implicated in these networks and contribute to the reproduction of gender. This thesis argues that gender is not a fixed and stable phenomenon which simply exists. Rather, concepts of gender are continuously generated through human and more-than-human relations which span across the social and material world. As such, gender does not always get reproduced in normative ways. Infants and young children are continuously negotiating their knowledge and understanding of the gendered self, gendered other, and the gendered material in ways that sometimes reshape human-social gender norms.

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